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What to expect from Ecuador’s new president

Members of Ecuadorian military forces guard electoral packages of the second round of the last presidential elections in Quito, Ecuador, on 18 April 2017. EFE/Jose Jacome

What to expect from Ecuador’s new president

Ecuador"s National Electoral Council (CNE) kicked off the recount of more than 1.2 million of the votes cast during the presidential election last April 2 that pitted the ruling party"s Lenin Moreno against opposition candidate Guillermo Lasso to choose the successor to President Rafael Correa.

On April 2nd, with nearly all the votes counted, Lenín Moreno, the political heir of Ecuador’s left-wing president, Rafael Correa, won the presidential election by barely more than two percentage points. That victory brings to an end a series of defeats for left-wing governments in Latin America, as reported in The Economist.

Mr Moreno will try to continue Mr Correa’s free-spending populism, but he will have less money and will exercise less power than his predecessor did during more than a decade in office.

Mr Moreno probably won in part because voters preferred his promises of expanded welfare to his rival Guillermo Lasso’s, a former conservative banker, offer to cut taxes and red tape.

Mr Moreno, who was Mr Correa’s vice-president from 2007 to 2013, said he would continue his “21st-century socialism”, under which social-welfare spending doubled as a share of GDP between 2006 and 2012. Mr Moreno says he will treble a cash transfer to poor households, raise pensions, provide 100,000 subsidised houses a year and build 40 technical universities. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, will remain a guest at Ecuador’s embassy in London for the foreseeable future. (Mr Lasso would have made him face rape charges in Sweden.)

The narrow victory of Moreno led the Ecuador's National Electoral Council (CNE) to kick off the recount of more than 1.2 million of the votes cast during the presidential election last April 2.

CNE head Juan Pablo Pozo said that more than 3,800 electoral packets containing more than 1.2 million votes will be opened for the partial recount, and that they will be recounted following the request by the two political organizations that had candidates running to win the presidency.

The recount of votes is "not only for democracy," but also for "our dignity and for the truth," Pozo said, while rejecting the complaints of alleged fraud made by the opposition.